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Amazon Transparency Tracking

Amazon Takes One More Step Against Counterfeit Products

Amazon has long been a champion of the brands that choose to sell through the ecommerce platform, and now they are making it even easier for brands to ensure authenticity with Transparency. What is Transparency? Amazon Transparency allows customers to see everything about their purchased product including manufacture date and location.

Amazon Transparency

While Amazon has used FNSKUs for a long time to the benefit of brands – the FNSKU is a unique product code that kills any risk of commingled inventory – Transparency is a ste in the same direction for customers. The FNSKU was a basic barcode that is meant to go unnoticed by consumers, but the Transparency code is a QR code that Amazon is telling people about. It reinforces Amazon’s stance on a brand first mentality and shows that off to the consumer.

Will Transparency be widely used? Perhaps. If consumers are buying products that have many resellers, they may want to verify that their product is the real thing. Transparency now makes it hard for counterfeit products to be sold on amazon if customers are concerned.

Say a customer purchases a product they find out is counterfeit. More than likely, they will return the product in order to purchase the authentic item. We can pretty easily speculate that Amazon will see triggers with these types of returns and shut down those resellers in an effort to remove counterfeit products from the whole of the platform.

Who Does Transparency Affect?

We assume this is a bid from Amazon to land more name brand sellers, especially in the fashion category where brands are fiercely protective of their products and their products are more likely to be counterfeited. While fashion is the most striking category to benefit from Transparency, almost every other category will more than likely see a drop in counterfeit goods, if that was a problem before. Consumer electronics is another category where we think this will have a huge impact – although with Amazon Basics attempting to control this category outright we are almost more apt to assume that they are doing this for their own good here.

Wherever there is success in retail, there will almost always be counterfeit items. As Amazon is still seen in part as the wild west of retail – you never know when they will change things, or when a reseller will get a hold of discounted items and undercut the manufacturer – Transparency helps in a large way to rein in control using the customer as a gatekeeper.